Contents

On February 9, 1783, a funeral was held in the tunnels at the dead heart of London. It was the funeral of a warrior and a conjurer, a paladin and an oracle, the last of an ancient breed who'd once stood between the Earth and the bloodiest of its nightmares.

Her name was Scarlette. Part courtesan, part sorceress, this is her history: the part she played in the Siege of Henrietta Street, and the sacrifice she made in the defence of her world.

In the year leading up to that funeral, something raw and primal ate its way through human society, from the streets of pre-Revolutionary Paris to the slave-states of America. Something that only the eighteenth century could have summoned, and against which the only line of defence was a bordello in Covent Garden.

And then there was Scarlette's accomplice, the "elemental champion" who stood alongside her in the final battle. The one they called the Doctor.

The novel saw Lawrence Miles' return to writing Doctor Who novels following a well-publicised online "resignation" in August 1999.[1] It is his last Doctor Who novel to date, however, as he went on to writing Faction Paradox works for other publishers and other projects.

There is a character referred to only as Man with the Rosette. In Lance Parkin's AHistory, Parkin acknowledges that Lawrence Miles intended the Man with the Rosette to be the Master. He is present at the Doctor's wedding; the Doctor's only family. He has no beard because the Doctor grows one, wears all black, apart from a blue and white rosette on his lapel and refuses to fight the Doctor on the grounds that there are only four Time Lords left in the Universe.